PREFACE.
The Lost Lemuria.
PREFACE.
For
readers unacquainted with the progress that has been made in recent
years by earnest students of occultism attached to the Theosophical
Society, the significance of the statement embodied in the following
pages would be misapprehended without some preliminary explanation.
Historical research has depended for western civilisation hitherto,
on written records of one kind or another. When literary memoranda
have fallen short, stone monuments have sometimes been available, and
fossil remains have given us a few unequivocal, though inarticulate
assurances concerning the antiquity of the human race; but modern
culture has lost sight of or has overlooked possibilities connected
with the investigation of past events, which are independent of
fallible evidence transmitted to us by ancient writers. The world at
large is thus at present so imperfectly alive to the resources of
human faculty, that by most people as yet, the very existence, even
as a potentiality, of psychic powers, which some of us all the while
are consciously exercising every day, is scornfully denied and
derided. The situation is sadly ludicrous from the point of view of
those who appreciate the prospects of evolution, because mankind is
thus wilfully holding at arm's length, the knowledge that is
essential to its own ulterior progress. The maximum cultivation of
which the human intellect is susceptible while it denies itself all
the resources of its higher spiritual consciousness, can never be
more than a preparatory process as compared with that which may set
in when the faculties are sufficiently enlarged to enter into
conscious relationship with the super-physical planes or aspects of
Nature.For
anyone who will have the patience to study the published results of
psychic investigation during the last fifty years, the reality of
clairvoyance as an occasional phenomenon of human intelligence must
establish itself on an immovable foundation. For those who, without
being occultists—students that is to say of Nature's loftier
aspects, in a position to obtain better teaching than that which any
written books can give—for those who merely avail themselves of
recorded evidence, a declaration on the part of others of a disbelief
in the possibility of clairvoyance, is on a level with the proverbial
African's disbelief in ice. But the experiences of clairvoyance that
have accumulated on the hands of those who have studied it in
connection with mesmerism, do no more than prove the existence in
human nature of a capacity for cognizing physical phenomena distant
either in space or time, in some way which has nothing to do with the
physical senses. Those who have studied the mysteries of clairvoyance
in connection with theosophic teaching have been enabled to realize
that the ultimate resources of that faculty range as far beyond its
humbler manifestations, dealt with by unassisted enquirers, as the
resources of the higher mathematics exceed those of the abacus.
Clairvoyance, indeed, is of many kinds, all of which fall easily into
their places when we appreciate the manner in which human
consciousness functions on different planes of Nature. The faculty of
reading the pages of a closed book, or of discerning objects
blindfold, or at a distance from the observer, is quite a different
faculty from that employed on the cognition of past events. That last
is the kind of which it is necessary to say something here, in order
that the true character of the present treatise on Atlantis may be
understood, but I allude to the others merely that the explanation I
have to give may not be mistaken for a complete theory of
clairvoyance in all its varieties.We
may best be helped to a comprehension of clairvoyance as related to
past events, by considering in the first instance the phenomena of
memory. The theory of memory which relates it to an imaginary
rearrangement of physical molecules of brain matter, going on at
every instant of our lives, is one that presents itself as plausible
to no one who can ascend one degree above the thinking level of the
uncompromising atheistical materialist. To every one who accepts, as
even a reasonable hypothesis, the idea that a man is something more
than a carcase in a state of animation, it must be a reasonable
hypothesis that memory has to do with that principle in man which is
super-physical. His memory in short, is a function of some other than
the physical plane. The pictures of memory are imprinted, it is
clear, on some non-physical medium, and are accessible to the
embodied thinker in ordinary cases by virtue of some effort he makes
in as much unconsciousness as to its precise character, as he is
unconscious of the brain impulse which actuates the muscles of his
heart. The events with which he has had to do in the past are
photographed by Nature on some imperishable page of super-physical
matter, and by making an appropriate interior effort, he is capable
of bringing them again, when he requires them, within the area of
some interior sense which reflects its perception on the physical
brain. We are not all of us able to make this effort equally well, so
that memory is sometimes dim, but even in the experience of mesmeric
research, the occasional super-excitation of memory under mesmerism
is a familiar fact. The circumstances plainly show that the record of
Nature is accessible if we know how to recover it, or even if our own
capacity to make an effort for its recovery is somehow improved
without our having an improved knowledge of the method employed. And
from this thought we may arrive by an easy transition at the idea,
that in truth the records of Nature are not separate collections of
individual property, but constitute the all-embracing memory of
Nature herself, on which different people are in a position to make
drafts according to their several capacities.I
do not say that the one thought necessarily ensues as a logical
consequence of the other. Occultists know that what I have stated is
the fact, but my present purpose is to show the reader who is not an
Occultist, how the accomplished Occultist arrives at his results,
without hoping to epitomize all the stages of his mental progress in
this brief explanation. Theosophical literature at large must be
consulted by those who would seek a fuller elucidation of the
magnificent prospects and practical demonstrations of its teaching in
many directions, which, in the course of the Theosophical
development, have been laid before the world for the benefit of all
who are competent to profit by them.The
memory of Nature is in reality a stupendous unity, just as in another
way all mankind is found to constitute a spiritual unity if we ascend
to a sufficiently elevated plane of Nature in search of the wonderful
convergence where unity is reached without the loss of individuality.
For ordinary humanity, however, at the early stage of its evolution
represented at present by the majority, the interior spiritual
capacities ranging beyond those which the brain is an instrument for
expressing, are as yet too imperfectly developed to enable them to
get touch with any other records in the vast archives of Nature's
memory, except those with which they have individually been in
contact at their creation. The blindfold interior effort they are
competent to make, will not, as a rule, call up any others. But in a
flickering fashion we have experience in ordinary life of efforts
that are a little more effectual. "Thought Transference" is
a humble example. In that case "impressions on the mind" of
one person—Nature's memory pictures, with which he is in normal
relationship, are caught up by someone else who is just able, however
unconscious of the method he uses—to range Nature's memory under
favourable conditions, a little beyond the area with which he him
self is in normal relationship. Such a person has begun, however
slightly, to exercise the faculty of astral clairvoyance. That term
may be conveniently used to denote the kind of clairvoyance I am now
endeavouring to elucidate, the kind which, in some of its more
magnificent developments, has been employed to carry out the
investigations on the basis of which the present account of Atlantis
has been compiled.There
is no limit really to the resources of astral clairvoyance in
investigations concerning the past history of the earth, whether we
are concerned with the events that have befallen the human race in
prehistoric epochs, or with the growth of the planet itself through
geological periods which antedated the advent of man, or with more
recent events, current narrations of which have been distorted by
careless or perverse historians. The memory of Nature is infallibly
accurate and inexhaustibly minute. A time will come as certainly as
the precession of the equinoxes, when the literary method of
historical research will be laid aside as out of date, in the case of
all original work. People among us who are capable of exercising
astral clairvoyance in full perfection—but have not yet been called
away to higher functions in connexion with the promotion of human
progress, of which ordinary humanity at present knows even less than
an Indian ryot knows of cabinet councils—are still very few. Those
who know what the few can do, and through what processes of training
and self-discipline they have passed in pursuit of interior ideals,
of which when attained astral clairvoyance is but an individual
circumstance, are many, but still a small minority as compared with
the modern cultivated world. But as time goes on, and within a
measurable future, some of us have reason to feel sure that the
numbers of those who are competent to exercise astral clairvoyance
will increase sufficiently to extend the circle of those who are
aware of their capacities, till it comes to embrace all the
intelligence and culture of civilised mankind only a few generations
hence. Meanwhile the present volume is the first that has been put
forward as the pioneer essay of the new method of historical
research. It is amusing to all who are concerned with it, to think
how inevitably it will be mistaken—for some little while as yet, by
materialistic readers, unable to accept the frank explanation here
given of the principle on which it has been prepared—for a work of
imagination.For
the benefit of others who may be more intuitive it may be well to say
a word or two that may guard them from supposing that because
historical research by means of astral clairvoyance is not impeded by
having to deal with periods removed from our own by hundreds of
thousands of years, it is on that account a process which involves no
trouble. Every fact stated in the present volume has been picked up
bit by bit with watchful and attentive care, in the course of an
investigation on which more than one qualified person has been
engaged, in the intervals of other activity, for some years past. And
to promote the success of their work they have been allowed access to
some maps and other records physically preserved from the remote
periods concerned—though in safer keeping than in that of the
turbulent races occupied in Europe with the development of
civilisation in brief intervals of leisure from warfare, and hard
pressed by the fanaticism that so long treated science as
sacrilegious during the middle ages of Europe.Laborious
as the task has been however, it will be recognized as amply repaying
the trouble taken, by everyone who is able to perceive how absolutely
necessary to a proper comprehension of the world as we find it, is a
proper comprehension of its preceding Atlantean phase. Without this
knowledge all speculations concerning ethnology are futile and
misleading. The course of race development is chaos and confusion
without the key furnished by the character of Atlantean civilization
and the configuration of the earth at Atlantean periods. Geologists
know that land and ocean surfaces must have repeatedly changed places
during the period at which they also know—from the situation of
human remains in the various strata—that the lands were inhabited.
And yet for want of accurate knowledge as to the dates at which the
changes took place, they discard the whole theory from their
practical thinking, and except for certain hypotheses started by
naturalists dealing with the southern hemisphere, have generally
endeavoured to harmonize race migrations with the configuration of
the earth in existence at the present time.In
this way nonsense is made of the whole retrospect; and the
ethnological scheme remains so vague and shadowy that it fails to
displace crude conceptions of mankind's beginning which still
dominate religious thinking, and keep back the spiritual progress of
the age. The decadence and ultimate disappearance of Atlantean
civilisation is in turn as instructive as its rise and glory; but I
have now accomplished the main purpose with which I sought leave to
introduce the work now before the world, with a brief prefatory
explanation, and if its contents fail to convey a sense of its
importance to any listeners I am now addressing, that result could
hardly be accomplished by further recommendations of mine.